Tag: Michael Skakel
Posted on Fri Oct 26, 2007 at 11:05:00 AM EST
Tags: Michael Skakel (all tags)
A state court trial judge has has refused to grant Michael Skakel a new trial based on new evidence presented at a hearing last summer showing he did not kill Martha Moxley.
Karazin found that the 2003 interview of Skakel's Brunswick School classmate, Gitano "Tony" Bryant, in which Bryant told a private investigator that his friends Adolph Hasbrouck and Burt Tinsley confessed to killing Moxley, was not believable. Bryant is a cousin of NBA star Kobe Bryant.
The judge said no other witnesses at the 2002 trial or the hearing placed Bryant or the other two youths in Belle Haven on the night of the murder and physical evidence did not bear out Bryant's claim that the two boys had described dragging her by the hair.
"The testimony of Bryant is absent any genuine corroboration," Karazin wrote. "It lacks credibility and therefore would not produce a different result at a new trial."
The defense will appeal the decision. And file another suit challenging the conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel.
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Posted on Fri Apr 13, 2007 at 01:04:15 PM EST
Tags: Michael Skakel (all tags)
Michael Skakel's hearing on a Motion for New Trial begin Tuesday in Connecticut. Court TV will be televising it. The hearing is expected to last two weeks.
The hearing will center on a 2003 interview in which Gitano "Tony" Bryant reportedly implicated two friends in the 1975 bludgeoning of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich.
Lawyers for Skakel, 47, the nephew of Ethel Kennedy, must prove Bryant's account surfaced after the trial and likely would have changed the verdict.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Skakel's original defense lawyer (and good TalkLeft pal) Mickey Sherman will be witnesses.
I expect there will be a lot of evidence presented about documents withheld by the prosecution in discovery.
TalkLeft's past coverage of the Skakel case is here. I think there was a paltry amount of evidence against him, most of which came from non-credible sources.
Take for example, Gregory Coleman, the dead drug addict who for all intents and purposes was allowed to testify from the grave.
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